WILLIAM F. STARK was born in Milwaukee in 1927 and grew up within earshot of a Lake Michigan foghorn. As a boy, he raced small sailboats at his grandparents’ summer home on Wisconsin’s Pine Lake and paddled canoes in the Ontario wilderness. In 1943, at age 16, he first went to sea working a summer job as a messboy aboard the Great Lakes ore freighter Carl C. Conway, followed by other summers aboard an Alaska fishing boat and the Swedish freighter Ragneborg. At age 18, he joined the Naval Air Corps and was a cadet in training when World War II ended.
Matriculating at Dartmouth College, Stark interrupted his studies to serve as an Ordinary Seaman on the Finnish four-masted barque Pamir during her last rounding of Cape Horn in 1949. Following that historic voyage, he completed a history degree at Dartmouth College, married the former Judith Zentner of Milwaukee, with whom he had four children, and went on to become president of the family candy manufacturing firm. A writer by avocation, he published articles about foreign travel in a number of magazines and wrote several books on Wisconsin history. He completed this memoir shortly before he died in January 2003.
PETER STARK is the son of The Last Time Around Cape Horn author William F. Stark. He is a long-time contributor to Outside Magazine and his work has also appeared in Smithsonian, The New Yorker, and many other publications. He is the author of a collection of essays, Driving to Greenland, a book about adventurers going to extremes, Last Breath: The Limits of Adventure, and is editor of an anthology of Arctic literature, Ring of Ice. His assignments and travels have taken him to Greenland, Tibet, Manchuria, West Africa, Irian Jaya, Iceland, the Sahara Desert and elsewhere. His lives in Missoula, Montana, with his wife and two young children.